tLoE XXIII: Season's Greetings! · 4:35am Nov 13th, 2015
Greetings and Salutations, dear readers! We all know what time it is, it's Land of Equestria Time! However, it is also a time of changing seasons...which is the inspiration for today's topic: seasons in Equestria! And I don't mean fashion or sport seasons, I mean physical seasonal changes.
Now, each of us knows that, on Earth, the changing of seasons-from Spring to Summer to Fall to Winter-is caused my the earth shifting slightly as it orbits the sun. The wary wobbles on it's axis, shifting certain parts closer or farther away from the sun, resulting in automatic seasons. However, the Planet on which Equstria resides does NOT naturally rotate, and thus does not naturally wobble. As far as we know, Celestia and Luna naturally control the planet's rotation, and nothing else. So, how do seasons function in Equestria? Well, much like all other formerly natural processes, they're artificially controlled by the Equestrians.
Our first introduction to this was in Season one, when we witnessed firsthand the running of the leaves, which marks the beginning of their fall season. They vibrate the ground and run past, in an attempt to shake and blow off the leaves of the trees around them. Now the trees themselves appeared to naturally begin to turn brown, so half of a process may remain. It's up to conjecture whether or not Equestria was always manually controlled, it was merely taken control of by the ponies.
One of the more obvious seasonal starts was also a Season 1 episode: Winter Wrap Up. They begin their spring season by manually getting rid of all of the snow, waking up animals from their hibernation, clearing the skies of the sun-blocking cloud layer to raise the temperature and terminate snowfall, and plant some crops, among other smaller tasks. They manually initiate Spring in this manner through a nation wide collective effort, which may lead one to question of Winter ever actually comes to unpopulated regions of Equestria.
Finally, in one of the more recent episodes (Tanks for the Memories), we witness the Winterization process, where clouds are placed, water is frozen, snow is dropped, etc. as seen in Winter wrap-up, a continuous upper cloud layer helps prevent sunlight from warming the area, and allows temperatures to drop sufficiently to keep snow from melting. Animals are put into hibernation, the farmers halt their farming, and the Pegasus have their hands full with maintaining the new climate.
Now, the transition from spring to summer has yet to be explained, but it is not a very obvious or dramatic shift, meaning we'll likely not see it. However, the shifts we have seen demonstrate the incredible power of a collective effort: they literally artificially instate seasons upon themselves in a continuously successful cycle, so much more interesting than the natural processes of Earth, if I do say so myself.
Too long? Here's the Abridged version!
-Equestrian Seasons are artificial rather than Automatic.
-They run the leaves off of their trees, although the changing of the leaves may still be natural
-Winter-Wrap-Up cleared away the winterized climate thoroughly, and begins spring
-Winterization is a major process, and it keeps the Pegasi quite busy positioning clouds, freezing, and dropping snow.
Well, that's all this time everyone! Just keep doing what you all do best, And I'll see you next time!
I'm Ironsmith, invent on!
The Big O (the Big O is a mathematical term for something which overwhelms all else, thus making mathematical modeling easy because one can ignore all else) of our seasons is axial tilt. The eccentricity of the orbit of the Earth varies the distance from the Sun a little, but the axial tilt overwhelms it.
On Pluto, the extreme eccentricity overwhelms the axial tilt of Pluto.
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Ah, Axial tilt. A much better term than "wobble" to be fair I wrote this one pretty late, but thanks for the info, I'll definitely fix it!
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Assuming, of course I can remember how to edit blog posts (darned mobile interface! ).